Pertinacious Papist has compiled a list of changes that were not formally called for in Vatican II that have been inflicted on the Church nonetheless. It’s a pretty comprehensive list, even if some items are debatable as far as what that most unspecific and bewildering of Councils specified. BTW, this list is actually a compilation of items Michael Voris has brought up of late, so the ultimate credit is due to him.

The list is below. I’ll add a few comments as it goes:

Communion in the hand [Definitely not supported by VII, and only implemented by Paul VI in a moment of weakness under threat of schism from the Dutch]

Altar girls [Pope Saint JPII]

Priests facing the people [Not called for by VII at all. Counter to some other conciliar statements. How it came about was a master-work of nefarious creation of “demand” by subtly changing wording in subsequent non-conciliar documents on the Liturgy. But Bugnini was an expert at subterfuge]

Gregorian chant insisted upon by V2 [Pride of place, hah]

Eucharistic ministers [An utter novelty in the history of the Church, but flow naturally from Communion in hand]

Protestant music in Mass [Shoot Dan Schutte]

Use of Latin in Mass insisted on by V2 [And a document of the highest doctrinal import by Pope St. John XXIII, Veterum Sapientia]

Catholics leading the way on gay marriage approval [And how about the many parishes with sodomite friendly ministries?]

Refusal to enforce Canon 915 – to pro-aborts

Orthodox seminarians being carefully monitored, or not ordained or delayed [How about the vast majority forced out under great duress]

“Gay Masses” in many dioceses with the bishops’ knowledge

CCHD financial support for pro-abortion and pro-contraception groups [VII did call for bishop’s conferences, even if several pre-conciliar popes derided the idea, especially as construed in the US. Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiea Nostrae was an explicit rebuke of the US bishops in 1899]

CRS giving donations to Obama campaign

Homosexual or homosexual-friendly clergy

Enormous resistance to the Traditional Latin Mass by bishops and priests [VII said nothing of abolishing the Mass. It said nothing of creating a totally novel Novus Ordo. Such would never, ever have passed. How many bishops then turned around and dutifully implemented the Novus Ordo, or even more, abrogated the Mass and saw to the destruction of so many churches, is a testament to truly disordered ultramontanism. If there had been harder pushback, none of these developments may have occurred]

Non-stop emphasis on “earthly” matters like immigration and gun-control

Failure to preach against contraception

There were two great failures at Vatican II, both, it must be said, carefully construed and insisted upon by the popes who oversaw the Council. The first was the failure to condemn communism, which was the #1 request of the bishops of the Council. That request was that the Council would come out with a statement formally condemning communism, but John XXIII desperately wanted an “ecumenical” council with Orthodox involvement, so he agreed in advance there would be no conciliar condemnation, nor even pointed discussion, of communism.

The second, of course, was contraception. Rather than clearly condemn what had always been sinful, since the time of the first Apostles, the Council hid behind the fig leaf of pending “papal commissions” – commissions which said contraceptive use was A-OK! Even so, at that time, at least, the vast majority of bishops viewed contraception as not just sinful but just plain evil.

Even with the fall of the Former Soviet Union, communism still lurks about. Our own president, I think, would be very happy going down that road. And contraception is the foundation of current-day American life. These are subsidiary errors to godlessness and bad theology, but they are probably two of the most destructive errors afflicting the world today. The Church would be in a much stronger position against those errors had the Council decried them. But that did not suit the dominant progressive purpose.

What else would you add to the list, in addition to the failure to condemn communism? Another error that has come about, but not necessarily from the Council, is mass disbelief in hell within the Church. Universal salvation. Fornication. Catholic pseudo-divorce in abusive annulments. Porn. Priest boy abuse. Disordered ecumenism. Religious indifferentism. Collegiality. Undermining doctrinal authority. Modernism.

And like all religions, it has creeds, dogmas, liturgies, expiation, errors, and heresies. Sexular paganism is not a religion to be trifled with, nor is it one that engages in happy, endless dialogue. It is the most aggressively, forcefully expansionist religion the world has seen since islam burst forth in the 7th century, and it brooks no competition. Between the savage rock of militant islam, and the irresistible force of sexular paganism, the Church is meant to be crushed.

The guy below almost gets it, but then falls apart at the end. He does not seem to have the Faith to guide his understanding of events, and thus falls for the propaganda he’s been exposed to since infancy:

From the dawn of the modern age, religious thinkers have warned that, strictly speaking, secular politics is impossible — that without the transcendent foundation of Judeo-Christian monotheism to limit the political sphere, ostensibly secular citizens would begin to invest political ideas and ideologies with transcendent, theological meaning. [I would say it goes back way before the modern age. Christianity is a religion encompassing every aspect of life, but so is every other religion! It is only in the “modern age” that people have bought the fantasy that they could compartmentalize their religion into a little box they open on Sunday. What that has meant in practice is that religion has shrunk as the secular state has grown, until…….]

Put somewhat differently: Human beings will be religious one way or another. Either they will be religious about religious things, or they will be religious about political things. [Exactly. Because we were created that way]

With traditional faith in rapid retreat over the past decade, liberals have begun to grow increasingly religious about their own liberalism, which they are treating as a comprehensive view of reality and the human good. [This has been going on much longer than a decade, silly]

[Now the wheels come off….]But liberalism’s leading theoreticians (Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Mill) never intended it to serve as a comprehensive view of reality and the human good. On the contrary, liberalism was supposed to act as a narrowly political strategy for living peacefully in a world of inexorably clashing comprehensive views of reality and the human good.

The key to the strategy was the promulgation of the pluralistic principle of toleration.

And that is where the endarkenment philosphes, in their arrogance, got things disastrously wrong.

The men above, and others not listed, deliberately wanted to curb “religious extremism” (read: the influence of the Church). They set about creating a “tolerant” state that would do just that. Of course, “extremism” to one is being faithful to another. And the philosphes tended to find any public witness offensive – they were in fact the far left of their time. So the notions they encouraged – government indifferent to religion, trying to greatly curb religious influence on government – in fact created a situation that simply flipped the paradigm in Church-state relations from the Church occasionally having the whip hand to the state always – always – being the dominant power. As time has gone by, as acceptance of the secular liberal state has advanced, Christianity has been forced into retreat. But man being a fundamentally religious creature, instead of religion really going away, the very good and holy religion of Christianity has been replaced by a neo-paganism.

Many traditional Catholics have argued that this result was inevitable. That any nation/culture not founded explicitly as Catholic and with Jesus Christ as its visible head would eventually become a competitor, and even enemy, of the Church. Our secular pagan superstate certainly seems headed irreversibly in that direction, and has for some time. The folly was in ever thinking that right, moral, and just government divorced from Jesus Christ could even be maintained. It cannot.

And so Jefferson, Locke, et. al., are the direct intellectual forebears of today’s sexular pagans. Jefferson laughed at Christianity, generally, and yet he is the true “father” of our government. It seems hard to argue that where we are at today, as a nation, is an aberration. It seems more likely to look back in admiration at how long this nation was able to cling to its Christian heritage in spite of the derangement of its founding.

So, it would seem we are in for a very rough ride. But God overcomes all.

The Centers for Disease Control, who apparently cannot control disease very well, has performed one of the more detailed studies yet as to the number of self-reported “homosexuals” in this country. The number, as so many previous studies have shown, is very low – about 2% claim to be “gay, lesbian, or bisexual,” while a further 1% didn’t answer the question. Almost 97% affirmed their heterosexuality.

However, given that I have much personal experience with individuals who are either now presently involved in perverse relationships but used to be heterosexual, or used to be sodo-oriented but now claim to be “straight,” even this 2% figure is likely fluid for a large number of the respondents. The number of hardcore, “born that way” and “that way for life” sodomites is usually about 1%. So for the sake of the 1%, the 99% are witnessing the destruction of marriage as it has always been known, and general moral and cultural collapse (in which many of the 99% are gleefully participating for their own reasons, but many of those would rather the destruction stop at their preferred sin, like contraception, rather than go away to total social-sexual chaos).

Given the level of coverage issues surrounding same-sex attracted people generate, one would think there would be a lot more of them. And in fact, most people drastically overestimate the number of homosexuals around, precisely for that reason. The article below notes some of the reasons for that. However, given that the author is an atheist, he winds up blaming both left and right for the over-magnification of the “homosexual” issue. I will take his data and a few points and argue differently – the reason this matter has been so powerfully advanced and is receiving so much attention is due to the hard left’s perverse need to destroy the existing culture, and especially Christianity, if they are ever to realize their Huxley-esqe Brave New World of sexular socialist pagan utopia:

Given the prominence of the issue, you would expect homosexuality to be rampant in America. When asked to estimate how many gay people there are, most people guess that it’s on the order of 20% to 25% of the population. But yet another study has been released by the CDC giving a more scientific estimate, and it finds that almost 97 percent of Americans describe themselves as straight — the actual number who describes themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual is 2.3%. So the public’s perception is off by a whole order of magnitude.

It’s almost as if someone has been conspiring to elevate this issue way beyond its actual cultural significance. That is precisely what we find, and both sides are to blame.

For the moderate left……..the culture war over homosexuality is partly an attempt find a new civil rights movement to fight over so they can maintain a manufactured moral high ground.

This explains why they demand, not merely tolerance for homosexuals, but a kind of mandatory obeisance enforced by the state. You don’t want to actively cooperate in gay marriages by, say, making their wedding cakes? Too bad. You will be tolerant, you bastard, or we’ll bash you over the head. [Even more, the hard left desires to destroy, and completely, any entity that could possibly compete with the allegiance to the Leviathan state in the hearts, minds, and souls of men. This aspect was “cooked into” liberalism in its inception way back in the endarkenment and even before]

This also explains a lot of bizarre proposals that can only be described as a form of trolling: deliberate attempts to provoke an outraged reaction. I’m talking about things like demanding as a matter of principle that transsexuals be allowed to use school restrooms that correspond to their artificial gender identity rather than their biological one. If homosexuals are about 2.3% of the population, transsexuals are a much smaller group. Even an analysis that argues that their number is underestimated (if you include many who are not out of the closet) still places the figure two to three orders of magnitude smaller—from about one tenth of one percent to one one-hundredth of a percent of the population. [That’s the most valuable data in this fairly erroneous piece. Those so deranged as to be afflicted with gender dysphoria are of such small number that bending over backwards and enduring all kinds of hardship to satisfy their whims is about as ludicrous as it gets. The number of “transgendered” people ranges from the tens to the hundreds of thousands – in a nation of hundreds of millions, it is ridiculous to have to bend over backwards to please them, including further eroding sexual distinctions.]Such cases are so rare that you would think they could be dealt with reasonably in their individual and local contexts.

The author then goes on to say that the “right,” and in particular the loathed and feared “religious right,” is just as much to blame for the overemphasis on this issue as is the hard left, because “homosexuality” is just a means to get the extreme base of each side all excited and ready to donate money. That ignores so much evidence it is laughable, and is the kind of statement that could only be made by an atheist, who pointedly finds absolutely nothing of valuable in religion or religiously-dictated morality and finds it ludicrous that anyone else could, either.

Now, I am not gullible. I know there are especially political elements on the right that constantly stoke fears of the depredations of the other side as a fundraising gimmick. Duly noted. And I’m sure there are times when devout souls like myself get excited and perhaps exaggerate the import of some of the smaller episodes of persecution or decay in morality.

But overall, I am forced by the vast preponderance of the evidence to conclude that the atheist is blind to the impact of the present left-driven attack on the culture and traditional morality because he is himself a part of it. Atheism is as distant from right morality, the very morality that led to Christendom, as is sodomy. And Christendom, after attack and perversion, still informs and provides much of the framework for the modern secular liberal state, which this author uses as one of several surrogate religions. So by pretending that the actions of a mere 2% are of no import, that we should just “live and let live,” entirely misses the point. Tolerance of sodomy poses an existential threat to this culture and the remnant of Christendom because it is an indicator of the utter triumph of the secular, self-pleasing mindset and the advance of a perverse morality so far from the truth it is actually evil. And liberty cannot exist without virtue, and on a mass scale. That is why free societies have been so rare in human history – it’s been as rare as mass virtue.

So, as we see at present, as virtue in a society collapses, so does liberty. This nation is obviously headed hard in the direction of totalitarianism. The left wing party is utterly run amok. They view that totalitarianism as a good thing, as they intend to be the overseers. To the extent that support for sodomy, abortion, fornication, porn, contraception, divorce on demand, or whatever else moves the ball down the field, they are in favor of it. And yet, somehow the right is equally to blame? Please.

One interesting facet Christopher Ferrara argues in Liberty: The God That Failed, is that even with our ability to vote and, supposedly, ‘choose’ our leaders, we are actually far, far less free in these United States in the Year of Our Lord 2014 than was the average peasant or burgher under the most “despotic” medieval king. The modern secular state arrogates, through the very act of claiming to be the representative of the people and their will, powers to itself far, far more expansive, invasive, and destructive powers than any preceding form of government ever did. And we see that in its most pristine, crystalline form in the more authoritarian fascist, communist, and socialist states. Orwell’s Eurasia is sort of the apotheosis of all that.

And all that invasive, crippling overreach can be traced back to a simple cause, as Solzhenitsyn noted: “men have forgotten about God.”

That is also, of course, the reason for the triumph of the hard left and all the perversions devastating this culture: men have forgotten about God.

Cardinal Walter Brandmuller, eminent historian and great friend of the TLM, has responded to a very famous claim made recently from a most notable personage in the Church, that the discipline of priestly celibacy was “established” in the 10th century. As I already noted, that is an extremely misleading statement, celibacy for clerics was a feature of the Church from day one, was endorsed by Christ in the Gospels, spoken of by St. Paul, and required to hold a bishopric from very early on. It only became the universal discipline in the West somewhat later, for various reasons, and was instituted as a formal discipline for all clergy, even if throughout history fallen men serving in the priesthood have fallen to temptation.

Cardinal Brandmuller makes some very good points on all of the above, plus more:

……In particular, it must be emphasized in the first place that celibacy by no means dates back to a law invented 900 years after the death of Christ. It is instead the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke that report the words of Jesus in this regard.

Matthew writes (19:29): “And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.”

What Mark writes (10:29) is very similar: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold.”

Luke (18:29ff.) is even more precise: “Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.” [These are impressive verses in support of priestly celibacy. I would say, however, that Saint Matthew XIX:11-12 is even better: “Who said to them: All men take not this word, but they to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs, who were born so from their mother’s womb: and there are eunuchs, who were made so by men: and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. He that can take it, let him take it.”

Jesus does not address these words to the masses, but rather to those whom he sends out to spread his Gospel and proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God. [The same applies to Matt XIX:11-12, too]

In order to fulfill this mission it is necessary to free oneself from any earthly and human attachment. And seeing that this separation signifies the loss of what is taken for granted, Jesus promises a “recompense” that is more than appropriate.

……Attention must also be called to the stirring appeal for celibacy or conjugal abstinence made by the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 7:29ff.): ” I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none.” And again: “The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” It is clear that Paul is addressing these words in the first place to bishops and priests. And he himself would have adhered to this ideal…….

….The original form of celibacy therefore allowed the priest or bishop to continue his family life, but not his conjugal life. For this reason as well the preference was to ordain men who had reached an advanced age. [And this was vitally necessary in the early Church, where most people in the Church were not born into Christianity, but converted as adults. They thus often had wives, children, etc. But for those called to the priesthood, even very early on, it became essentially mandatory that they be chaste, even if married. As time went on and more and more Catholics were born into the Faith, there grew a larger pool of men who were raised in the Catholic ethic and who would choose the Kingdom of God for life, eschewing a spouse and devoting themselves totally to God.]

The fact that all of this can be traced back to ancient and sacred apostolic traditions is testified to by the works of ecclesiastical writers like Clement of Alexandria and the north African Tertullian, who lived in the 2nd-3rd century after Christ. Another witness of the high consideration bestowed on abstinence among Christians is a series of edifying tales of the apostles, the apocryphal ‘Acts of the Apostles’ composed in the 2nd century and widely read.

In the 3rd century the literary documentation on the abstinence of the clergy multiplied and became increasingly explicit, especially in the East. For example, here is a passage from the Syrian ‘Didascalia’: “The bishop, before he is ordained, must be put to the test to establish if he is chaste and has raised his children in the fear of God.” The great theologian Origen of Alexandria (3rd century) also recognized the celibacy of abstinence as binding; a celibacy that he explains and explores theologically in various works. And obviously there are other documents that could be brought forward in support, something that obviously is not possible here…….

…...[Now some good history…..] It was the Council of Elvira in 305-306 that put this practice of apostolic origin into the form of a law. With canon 33, the Council prohibited bishops, priests, deacons, and all other clergy from having conjugal relations with their wives, and likewise prohibited them from having children. At the time it was therefore thought that conjugal abstinence was compatible with family life. Thus even the sainted pope Leo I, called Leo the Great, wrote around 450 that ordained men did not have to repudiate their wives. They were to remain together with them, but as if “they did not have them,” as Paul writes in the first letter to the Corinthians (7:29). [But it was also recognized that this situation posed a temptation that was disordered as a normative, or disciplinary, basis. That is to say, having married priests led to all kinds of problems, unchastity being only one of them. The tendency to fail to focus exclusively on the needs of the flock and be available all the time was even more significant]

With the passing of time there was an increasing tendency to ordain only celibate men. The codification would come in the Middle Ages, an era in which it was taken for granted that the priest and bishop would be celibate. It was another matter that the canonical discipline was not always followed to the letter, but this should not come as a surprise. And, as is in the nature of things, the observance of celibacy has seen highs and lows over the course of the centuries.

There is, for example, the famous and fiery dispute in the 11th century, at the time of what is called the Gregorian reform.[And which was probably alluded to by that famous personage, failing to get the date quite right.] At that juncture one witnessed a split that was so stark – especially in the German and French churches – as to lead the German prelates who were contrary to celibacy to forcibly expel from his diocese the bishop Altmann of Passau. In France, the pope’s emissaries who were charged with insisting on the discipline of celibacy were threatened with death, and at a synod held in Paris the sainted abbot Walter of Pontoise was beaten by bishops opposed to celibacy and was thrown in prison. In spite of this the reform succeeded and a renewed religious springtime took place.

It is interesting to note that the contestation of the precept of celibacy has always coincided with signs of decadence in the Church, while in times of renewed faith and cultural blossoming one has noted a strengthened observance of celibacy.

———-End Quote———-

And that is precisely right. The Church in the period ~850-~1050 was decadent and weak. The popes were largely political creatures dominated by secular interests of the Roman elite, and were more often than not profoundly immoral men. Most of the very worst popes in history come from this period. The entire Church, however, was at a low ebb during this time, and it was only in a few islands like Cluny that the orthodox Faith really held on. We should keep that in mind as events move forward in our own time.

Of course, we certainly seem to be at one of the lowest ebbs in the history of the Church today. Top to bottom, prince to peasant, adherence to the Faith is weak. People’s “god” is most often their loins, and their doctrine is self-serving sexular liberalism. So it perhaps should not be such a surprise that under these conditions, the errors and abuses of the past should resurface again today. The only question is whether the conditions exist today – as they have not for the past 17 centuries or so – for these abuses or even errors to be reinstated as formal discipline or “pastoral” applications of doctrine that have the effect of obliterating said doctrine. That is the thought that tortures many pious souls at present.

Pray for Cardinals Brandmuller, Burke, Cipriani, etc! Pray for them to be strong and decisive at the upcoming Synod on the family!

I mentioned in a post a month or two back that I had met an old school Republican party delegate, who shocked me when he told me he thought the masquerade known as same-sex marriage was just A-OK by him. I relayed in this post how this guy sends me a lot mailings that amount to bated-breath Republican propaganda. I ignore much of it. But he put together some data on demonrat gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis aka Abortion Barbie’s funding sources, and I thought, for the record, it would not a bad thing to share. I guess much of this was cobbled together from a recent Dallas Snoring News article. It might be useful to scratch a few folks or organizations off your list, if you had any doubt:

* Actress Jennifer Garner………………$ 25,000

* Actor Matt Damon………………………$ 5,000

* Marlo Thomas……………………………$ 5,000

* Carrie Fisher……………………………..$ 500

* Tom Hanks……………………………….$ 500 [I too bought the fantasy peddled in the 90s, when he was at his peak, that Tom Hanks was a nice, normal guy. There is no normal in Hollywood. They are as alien to you and me as creatures from Mars]

* Willie Nelson……………………………..$ 250,000 and he also performed at a Wendy Fund Raiser [Oh Willie, all that pot has rotted your brain. You’re blinded to the totalitarian tendencies of progressivism and its nature as an outlook built on blood. You never cease to disappoint me. This is not the Depression, Willie, and this is not your grandfathers demonrat party. Funny thing, an area priest knew Willie growing up in Abbot, and he’s a screaming lib, too. Something in the water, there?]

* Battleground Texas……………………$ 1,000,000 I am guessing Battle Ground got this money from the Natl Dem Party fund [This is the Obama-sourced group trying to turn Texas dem, permanently]

I’m sure those last two have given a lot more than that, or will. Most demonrat politicians thrive on illegal, under the table donations, as Obama did in his elections, taking money from foreign sources, the traitor.

In reality, I hope the dems and especially the pro-aborts go all-in and donate all the money they have to support Davis, because it will all be wasted. It’s money that could be used for even more evil purposes, at least in this case, it won’t do as much real damage.